Croax

Fiery Melee Fiery Melee / Bio Armor Fiery Melee / Dark Armor Fiery Melee / Electric Armor Fiery Melee / Energy Aura Fiery Melee / Fiery Aura Fiery Melee / Ice Armor Fiery Melee /Invulnerability Fiery Melee / Ninjitsu Fiery Melee / Radiation Armor Fiery Melee / Regeneration Fiery Melee / Shield Defense Fiery Melee / Stone Armor Fiery Melee / Super Reflexes Fiery Melee / Willpower

Energy Melee Energy Melee / Bio Armor Energy Melee / Dark Armor Energy Melee / Electric Armor Energy Melee / Energy Aura Energy Melee / Fiery Aura Energy Melee / Ice Armor Energy Melee / Invulnerability Energy Melee / Ninjitsu Energy Melee / Radiation Armor Energy Melee / Regeneration Energy Melee / Shield Defense Energy Melee / Stone Armor Energy Melee / Super Reflexes Energy Melee / Willpower

Electrical Melee Electrical Melee / Bio Armor Electrical Melee / Dark Armor Electrical Melee / Electric Armor Electrical Melee / Energy Aura Electrical Melee / Fiery Aura Electrical Melee / Ice Armor Electrical Melee / Invulnerability Electrical Melee / Ninjitsu Electrical Melee / Radiation Armor Electrical Melee / Regeneration Electrical Melee / Shield Defense Electrical Melee / Stone Armor Electrical Melee / Super Reflexes Electrical Melee / Willpower

Dual Blades Dual Blades / Bio Armor Dual Blades / Dark Armor Dual Blades / Electric Armor Dual Blades / Energy Aura Dual Blades / Fiery Aura Dual Blades / Ice Armor Dual Blades / Invulnerability Dual Blades / Ninjitsu Dual Blades / Radiation Dual Blades / Regeneration Dual Blades / Stone Armor Dual Blades / Super Reflexes Dual Blades / Willpower

Dark Melee Dark Melee / Bio Armor Dark Melee / Dark Armor Dark Melee / Electric Armor Dark Melee / Energy Aura Dark Melee / Fiery Aura Dark Melee / Ice Armor Dark Melee / Invulnerability Dark Melee / Ninjitsu Dark Melee / Radiation Armor Dark Melee / Regeneration Dark Melee / Shield Defense Dark Melee / Stone Armor Dark Melee / Super Reflexes Dark Melee / Willpower

Claws Claws / Bio Armor Claws / Dark Armor Claws / Electric Armor Claws / Energy Aura Claws / Fiery Aura Claws / Ice Armor Claws / Invulnerability Claws / Ninjitsu Claws / Radiation Armor Claws / Regeneration Claws / Willpower Claws / Stone Armor Claws / Super Reflexes

Broad Sword Broad Sword / Bio Armor Broad Sword / Dark Armor Broad Sword / Electric Armor Broad Sword / Energy Aura Broad Sword / Fiery Aura Broad Sword / Ice Armor Broad Sword / Invulnerability Broad Sword / Ninjitsu Broad Sword / Radiation Armor Broad Sword / Regeneration Broad Sword / Shield Defense Broad Sword / Stone Armor Broad Sword / Super Reflexes Broad Sword / Willpower

Croax's Tier List and Build Collection Index Introduction Primaries Secondaries Builds Introduction Hi all, as some of you might know, i really love to play the Stalker AT. That is why i have written a Guide to cover all the basics and give new and old players an idea of how to play the Stalker. Maybe that was the reason, why i started to look more into the Stalker AT Forum and noticed that the same Threads appeared with different people starting them. They were all like: "Is X/Y a good combination?", "X/Y need Build, help please!", "What to pair with X/ ?" or even "What is the best Stalker?". After a while i was thinking that i should rank all the Primaries and Secondaries of Stalkers and even support you with a build to every single combination of Stalkers. If you disagree with my ranking i would really like to see why you do think it should be different. And please keep in mind, that this is my own opinion and not set in stone. For the 216 Builds that i provide in this Collection, i have not played them all obviously. The build goals would change from combination to combination and could not allways be achieved. Some of the builds are just old builds of my Stalkers. If you are a new Player and need a build, this is the place to find it. If you are a veteran player, you can use some parts of the builds as templates. And if you think that Regen should be nerfed, please leave a post why 🙂 Primaries For the Primaries i started to rate the damage of each and every set. All of them are ok to excellent regarding single target damage, but some of them need a specific framework to perform properly. What does this mean? You would need some high amounts of recharge or a epic pool snipe, what makes some sets perform bad at start but shine later on in your leveling career. The next big point was AoE damage and that was a harder one to look into. The devs had replaced older sets AoE Attacks with Assasin strike which was a bad decision. The newer sets and reworked sets are all more in line with the versions other melee ATs get. I also factored the damage type into the rating. For example everyone knows Smashing and Lethal damage are resisted very commonly from all the enemys. After looking into the damage i checked the different sets for utilities like heals, defense buffs, crowd control or something similar. And finally i was thinking about all the people asking "What Powers can i skip/do i need with X/?" and that is a very important point. If you can enable a lot of build goals by having access to different IO sets and not only 5 melee attacks, that is a big selling point for some of the primaries. Now we can take a look at the Tier List for Stalker S Tier: There is no S Tier Stalker Primary, which means that there is not a single one that outshines everything else so strong that you have to ignore it for a better comparison of everything else. A Tier: Electrical Melee is here because it has the best AoE of all Stalker Primaries and it is also the best Version of Electrical Melee between all ATs. It normaly lacks Single Target Damage, but on Stalkers you have Assassin Strike and a Snipe to close that gap. Energy Melee is the best in Single Target Damage after the rework in i27. It is powerfull, strong and now it even has a cone attack. Street Justice was the former Nr. 1 in pylon damage and general content. Ice landed barely in this tier because it checked all boxes and covered everything i was asking for. Ice is equally strong for all content. B Tier: All the sets in this Tier are very close to each other, mostly because of their damage type. One exception is Dual Blades which has not been touched after release but is still very strong after all this years. Unfortunately only if you slam a lot of recharge into it and ignore the combo system at all. Another Primary that wants you to simply ignore the mechanic and stack recharge for only 4 attacks is kinetic melee. Without Assassin strike and the burst crits it would be in the lowest tier. Dark Melee was a close contender for Tier A but the set was designed with Soul Drain in mind and has therefore a little bit lower damage than it should have. The Homecoming Team has buffed/changed the set to lift it up higher than it ever was. Stone Melee was proliferated from tankers and brutes but unfortunately it has not enough damage to lift it up. The Knockdowns are a plus but there are much better options. Stone Melee feels better to play than it performs. C Tier: Like the sets in B Tier this sets are also very close to each other because of the bad damage type they deal. Savage Melee has been nerfed and lost a lot of its Single Target Damage. Ninja Blade and Broad Sword are allmost the same and are lacking Area Damage. Both sets would be D tier if they would lack parry. Staff Fighting has surprised me with how low it landed. The Damage is held back by its super long animations and it seems like you have a ton of utility but not the damage the other sets have. D Tier: "D" like "Due for a rework". These Primaries are very weak in comparison to all the others. Everything they can do is done bettter by something else. Martial Arts without AoE Attacks, Spines without Quills and Claws without Spin is all very lackluster. The Damage is low and after release these sets have not been touched at all. If there are devs that want to do some balancing, i guess this Tier is where to look. Secondaries To understand how i rated the secondaries it is important to understand the concept of "not dieing", "keeping you alive" and "immortal". Every secondary will help you not to die, but will need different levels of comitment to it. Do you log on, check that the toggles are running and just keep on killing or is it mandatory to click a healing/buff power with lengthy animations every 10 seconds? The better secondaries will keep you alive without much effort put into it. Then there is the powersets that will make you immortal. Why is it a bad thing you may wonder? Well the defense cap is well known and the stalker resist cap is also known, if you reach all caps with all the powers then you may have wasted some slots, powers and endurance into staying alive even more. When you reach a ceiling, there is no need to punch a hole into the roof and shoot for the stars. So what criterias are also used? On a Stalker Defense based sets perform much better than resist based ones, because of the lower resist cap (75% for Stalkers and scrapper, 90% for tankers and brutes). Not getting hit at all is allways more valuable than reducing the damage. Also you will not suffer from possible debuffs when you not get hit. And having lower hitpoints than scrappers makes resist based secondaries even less appealing. When we look into the tier list we also have to speak about the outdated views of the original devs, that made some unreasonable holes in the survivability of different secondaries. Be it a vulnerability to certain damage types or missing status protection. In the world of IOs some of these gaps can be closed easily, some can not be closed easily and some do not matter at all in real combat situation. I also valued the extra stuff that the secondary powerset brings onto the table. Is it a usefull recharge bonus, a useless debuff aura, a new area attack, where Stalkers are in desperate need of area damage or something else? And like with the Primary Tier List it is important to know what powers can be skipped and if it opens up build possibilities. With all these things in mind lets take a look into the Secondaries Tier List: S Tier: Thankfully again there is no single Powerset in this Tier. You can play with all the Secondaries without having to worry much. A Tier: Now if we just ignore the Psi hole in Energy Aura, this powerset just fulfills every single criteria listed above. With using energize every now and then you are fine to go. If someone is new to Stalkers in generell i allways recommend Energy Aura. You will run into some enemys from time to time that will be annoying but if the psi hole would not exist, this would be S Tier material. The other contender is Bio armor. It is the best version of a hybrid powerset (defense/resist/healing) out there, unfortunately you will be in the "not dieing" category all the time. That means you will have to understand what is going on around you and use your cooldowns accordingly or else you will die. That part keeps Bio from the S Tier. It is not easy to play but very rewarding. Stone Armor on the other Side is one of the best sets you can wish for. It has everything (recharge, endurance, damage, healing,...). It is like Energy Aura almost S Tier but the downsides are that you need every power and can not skip a single one here. It brings you a lot of build flexibility because you can decide yourself how survivable you want to be and therefor how much slots you want to put into it. B Tier: B Tier is all about the defense. All of the Secondaries that have Defenses as the first layer of survivability are here. Do not get fooled by the order, they are all very close in the ranking to each other. Every single one of them does something very unique. The only exceptions are Ice Armor and Ninjitsu. Ninjitsu is the weakest of the bunch because it has no resistances at all unlike the others. And does not increase your offensive capabilities. Ice armor on the other hand is so strong with Icy Bastion. Ice Armor caps almost all the defenses and with Icy bastion most resists. It alternates between 30 seconds of "immortal" and 60 seconds of "keeping you alive". it is very powerful as a survivability powerset. If any dev ever reads this, Icy Bastion is the way T9 armor sets should work. Unfortunately it offers no offense at all, which keeps it from getting into the A Tier. C Tier: Now we are at the Resist Tier. All Powersets are again very close to each other except the first and last one of the bunch. Electric Armor on paper looks like the resist brother of Energy Aura. It offers all the same stuff with only resists in mind. From all the resist powerset this looks the best. I was intrigued to rate it as a B Tier because i think it is sometimes better than Ninjitsu. And the last one of the resist sets is Willpower. Willpower was introduced as a hands free, turn the toggles on, do not care about psi or status protection and keep them bashing. But for Stalkers it was deprived of Quick Recovery which made it very endurance hungry and instead of having a great Rise of the Challenge aura it has Reconstruction. It feels like they wanted to insult Stalkers with this decision. Look at the wonderfull Sentinel solution for this Powerset. Take away Fast Healing for Quick Recovery and exchange Reconstruction for the Sentinel version of RttC and you have A Tier material. D Tier: It is the worst Secondary of them all. Regen really needs a rework, maybe the sentinel treatment? When i see what the Homecoming Team did to Energy Melee i think they will somehow change this Powerset to its former Glory. Right now it is just a Meme. Builds: You will now find a Post for every Primary here. If you want a certain Powercombination just look for the post with the Primary. You will find a Build with that Primary for every Armor set it can be paired with. I made these builds with Beginners in Mind and tried to make them sturdy enough to be in the "keeping you alive" category. You can change the builds as you like and add more procs or other things into it. You can decide yourself if you want to be more in the comfort zone or push the maximum dps. These builds are in the middle. For everyone that is just looking for abuild, this is the place. I hope that a lot of the players looking into this forum for some guidance will find this thread and be hopefully satisfied with what they find. And i also like to see your opinion of the rankings and if i have treated some of the powersets totally wrong. Feel free to tell me everything you think, that i did wrong and why it should be different. Broad Sword Claws Dark Melee Dual Blades Electrical Melee Energy Melee Fiery Melee Ice Melee Kinetic Melee Martial Arts Ninja Blade Psionic Melee Radiation Melee Savage Melee Spines Staff Fighting Stone Melee Street Justice

All enemy influencing auras are suppresed while hidden.

The Kinetic Melee T9 is not good with other AT and with Stalker it is just redundant. The ATO does the same. The cast time is really high and is not worth it. And for the ATO it depends on the build. sometimes it is good sometimes not needed. this time i wanted to cap S/L resists and therefore Mako was much more desired than the rest of the set.

Hi @Aeroprism, Kinetic Melee is one of the faster attacking Powersets and really shine whenn you have gathered some recharge. You cycle your first 3 attacks for 3 stacks of Assassin focus and then you Assassin Strike the target. I think you are doing it well and maybe you are lacking a strong build. Look here for my approach on the KM/EA Stalker: I would spend all the slots to the attacks first and build up the defenses later on when you have more slots to spare. To achieve good survivability you can use 6 pcs of Touch of death in Smashing Blow and Quickstrike and use Obliteration 6 pcs in Burst. Everything else should be like the build suggest it. In Kinetic Melees case the Burst out of Hide will allways crit. you could start a fight with Burst out of stealth and then use smashing blow->Body Blow->Quick Blow-> Assassin Strike -> Burst out of Stealth. And repeat this until you no longer can hit 2 targets with burst, because smashing blow will be more damage in that case. Maybe this way you could be a little bit faster. But in my experience KM needs a lot of recharge and endurance and then wants you to really quickly chain the attacks, because you fire them off so fast.

Hi @XylstoBanks SR has scaling resistance based on your current HP (Agile and Dodge). So it is better in game than it is on Paper. My take would be this: I even added the new Experimentation Powerpool which is underused in my opinion. You can have a great damage cooldown power with adrenalin booster. When you think about your HP and Endurance even more, then you can exchange the powerpool with the Force of Will Power Pool. Unleash potential has a lot of extra defense regen and endurance. In my opinion your Survivability and your Endurance management is totally fine. with 0,67/s consumption and 3,53/s endurance recovery and 3 performance shifter procs, i think you will not ever be out of endurance. You are comfortably over the defense cap to have some space for defense debuffs. should you ever think of beeing overwhelmed by defense debuffs, you can turn on weave. Did i mention Perma hasten and FF procs in your attack chain? That is some crazy amount of recharge. The only inconvenience is that you have hasten and practiced brawler that want to be on autocast. i would put practiced brawler on auto and click hasten manually. Toxic dart and boxing are the only powers that do not belong on the power bar and will be never used. everything else is either auto power/toggle or your attacks. With Build Up and Adrenalin Booster as the frequent and infrequent Damage buff. Attack chain is: GPB out of hide -> PB->TB->AS Allways GPB out of hide. ignore that there is a insight mechanic going on, it is useless. For AoE there is unfortunately only Mass levitate. I hope this helps you out.

Here is my take on this Stalker: I do not think that you should make a proc bomb out of Dark Regeneration because it is very endurance hungry but maybe it can be worth it. Also You should play with the other ATO that you are missing. Everything else looks ok. You can see the incarnates and other choices and adjust what you see fit. You can make Adrenalin booster work if you leave out laserbeam eye and maneuver. than you should be able to get the needed powers. slot parry with kinetic combat 4 piece for the missing defense because of maneuver and you may have your own variant. i did not use parry on my BS/EnA after i had some defenses but it may be different on Dark Armor:

You never would want to use it in an attack chain because it eats up your EF stack. EF stacks are best used in fast ET in single target situations.

Hey @Bopper, nice math! I wanted to help you with your project here, so here are my Rotations: TF(i got 2 EF stacks) -> ET (fast) -> Zapp -> ET (fast) -> AS Normally i should be hidden, then i start that chain again. When i do not get the double stack of EF i go with: TF(i only got 1 EF stack) -> ET (fast) -> Zapp -> AS The mindfull player will now find that the first chain has a small gap when i use ET-Zapp-GAP-ET. Even with very high recharge it is a very minor gap that did not break my dps on AVs because this gap is here for Build Up, Energize, Hasten, Incarnate Powers or Insiprations. Also i use to avoid slowET like hell and for single target i try to only use the 4 most damaging powers. It worked for me very well so far. Because of the frequent use of fast ET i end up damaging myself a lot, so Energize every now and then is very helpfull. I choosed to use the Purple damage proc in ET, but the proc chance might be low, i don't know. Anyway i hope that i could help you. Here is my build:

Hi Bopper, nice writeup and build. it is very similar to mine. But i use Bone Smasher and Maneuver instead of Kick and Cross Punch. I did miss having another AoE Power from time to time but i did not consider Cross Punch, because it would make me take another Power (Kick). So good job to tweak that all and still be tanky.

Hey you all. This conversation is going wild. There is a reason why i do not like debates. I would be happy to go into details with Stalkers soloing specific tasks, like the OP asked initialy. I think that Stalkers are very potent, but to be so strong you need a strong build. I think that boggle is not useless but i simply do not use it. There is a limit to which powers you can pick and how many slots to distribute. When i make a build i also am careful to pick them exemplar friendly. That makes builds somewhat tight and i end up droping powers to make room for the more impactful powers. If i look into /Nin for example there are Smoke Flash, Caultrops and Blinding powder. I am sure you can do silly things with it and slot them to get a lot of nice set bonuses, but you could also just pick Maneuver, Assault and Vengeance. Without any slots into these 3 Powers you can now slot 2 LotG and have nice but small damage and defense increase. Something that the 3 /Nin Powers never could support with only the initial slots. These are some of the tough choices i do make in my builds. And be sure that while soloing the freedom phalanx, you start to learn some things. For example which heroes can fly, numina heals other AVs and pen is a bitch. Soloing, while beeing one of the few challenges in this game, is not the most efficient way of doing things. Also you have to start with some preparations. Like getting the four stat enhancing accolades, warburg nukes, temp powers like daggers, analyser, lvl 4 incarnates and the good inspirations. And i now buy amplifiers for almost all of my high level toons. That you can solo something does not mean it is a walk in the park.

I do not like to be negative with my comments here. I will try to tell you here something what i did and not what people can not do, like posters above have done. That is why i want to say that i have played recently my EM/EnA Stalker a lot. My only AE damage Powers are Power Crash and Lightning Ball which comes very late. I soloed, the task force commander. (Yes, all of the TFs) Also i did the respec trials (again all of them). I have done the beast under the mountain and the sky riders TF on red side solo. I am sure i could do some more but i ended up teaming other TFs because, they had been weekly recently (ML, LRSF). i have to admit i did them on initial level, that is +1?. But just because i wanted to do it fast. I have no idea who is soloing TF and do it at +4. Most teams do not run TF at +4, because a lot of people just want to complete it quickly. In all of the TF i have done, the only one giving me trouble was Dr. Vashilok. And with trouble i mean i died once. The other TF all could have been Master of, but i do not use any modifications, i just start the TFs. With other Stalkers in the past, i have soloed Apex, Tin Mage and LRSF too. I am sure i could do some more. And in all of my Stalkers builds i completely Skip Powers like Boggle, Smoke Flash and Blinding Powder. If someone ever argues to pick these Powers because they are enablers for specific things. I would say that is a big noob trap and do not listen to any advice that these person gives to you.

I would recommend going EM/EA, because of the selfheal and endurance management of EA. HIgh recharge EM builds will do some severe self damage. SR is not enough to keep you alive from your own damage. But this is just my Opinion, YMMV. If you change your mind here is a build:

Here is my Version of this combo:

This is the build. i have not touched it since over a year, so some things could be different now maybe. I only play it on high level content because ageless is mandatory. @McOz

One of our fast Tinpex Runs. 2159,38 damage is nice. The other Stalker had a Greater Psi Blade crit with over 2k damge at the same time. Bobcat just droped dead from ~40% hp to 0 instant. Everyone on discord asked if we exploited sonething and if we could repeat it. It just turned out that the Stalkers crit at the same time. One of the best memories.

Hibernate, while beeing a purely one slot fun-pick in some builds, is just a epic pool power which is not in any way effecting the stalker ice/ice playstyle at all. also i do not think that it have been changed. which patch notes have that been? And after this little impact of a "starter", what else has been changed that would make the builds in this thread outdated? I think that @Sovera is comparing apples to bannans here. Ice Patch and Burn are very good powers that are PBAoE with an impact for the playstyle and/or Damage while Chilling embrace is much more comparable to Disrupt from EA, or Genetic Corrption from Bio or the Dark control Toggles. They are Toggles to start with which drain your endurance all the time. Ice Patch and Burn are used when needed and have a great impact with every cast, so they are worth the long cooldown or Endurance cost. The control Toggles are usefull in big enemy mobs and prolonged figths, but the reduction of recharge/damage/stuns whatever are not so meaningfull, because you can take out targets very fast as a stalker. A lot of Stalker builds just skip these control toggles at all. I don't think they are useless, but i understand that not everyone plans for prolonged encounters on stalkers. Also the Endurance management of a /ice Stalker relies on keeping Icy Bastion on cooldown and Energy Absorption to fill up the blue bar when Icy Bastion is not active. You have to get used to cycle these two powers and will have no endurance problems after that.

Could you tell us which Powers you are speaking of? Usually i read the patch notes closely but i may have missed it.

Hide grants bigger defense values when you are hidden. The moment you are not hidden the defense will be lower. Since that Screenshot is in the AE building i asume ypu are still hidden.your s l defenses are caped while hidden, but after you start attacking your def will drop by ~2%. You will have a huge boost to aoe defense, that will drop completely out of hide. The purple patch and eliteboss mechanic just adds zo the problem. Maybe OP can post the build?